Art Garfunkel's doing of "Barbara Allen" is one of the most beautiful I've ever heard---even though one of the orchestral instruments plays a devastatingly BAD note near the end of the song. I suspect they left it on that album because otherwise it was a perfect take.

That "Barbara Allen" is bested only by the rendition recorded by Jo Stafford with her husband, Paul Weston's lush orchestrations.

Still, a sparse and very straightforward version of the song done a-capella and recorded by the folksong collector Helene Stratman Thomas in Wisconsin is my absolute favorite performance of the song. (I do wish I could recall the woman's name.)

BACK TO THE TOPIC AT HAND and the comments in this thread:

How in God's name can CONTENT ever be of less importance than in-yo-face screaming and noise that keeps real content and, indeed, the story within the song, from being brought forth clearly and succinctly with metaphoric strength and intellect?? The answer is that it cannot.

This is the difference between Roosevelt and Bush. It is the reason that THE BEAT GENERATION produced book after book, insightful poem after poem, valuable literary thought after valuable thought-----while the Hippy thing led to numbness and the Woodstock generation romping in the mud and merde of a New York cow pasture.

The generation gaps all along the timeline represent the dumbing down steps on a ladder that brought us from then to now. And there is very little any of us can do about it. Not bad. Not good. Just is. And rather sad.

Art Thieme
(who probably should know better than to post at the end of the day.)